Tag Archives: wellie wishers

Every time I’m gone for a while the posts are long. Just scroll past the text to the bottom for the pattern if you’d like! 🙂

I wish you could all have seen the smile on my face this morning as I went through the flickr page and saw what everyone had made! I started pasting some of my favorites here and then there were too many, but I did want to share this pic from Sylvie:

because when I told my mom I was taking Lottie to Korea, she said, “Oh I think you should take that other cute little one you have instead…what’s her name? Ten Ping? She looks more like she could be Korean” I totally agree, but if you’ve priced both dolls recently you’ll understand why Lottie got to come with 😊 Although they’re similar in height, Ten Ping is wider, more like a vintage Ginny, whereas Lottie is more like a Tiny Betsy:

See the vintage cuties in the photo above? They’re the reason the sew-along patterns are going to stay posted (rather than reappearing in my etsy shop) and you’ll have an unprecedented EXTRA MONTH to get your sewing done because I’m feeling generous due to generosity toward me. Here’s the deal: If you’ve been sewing along and posting your pix here you can enter your links to your photos by July 5 here and get a free pattern for Betsy’s dog, Nosy, which will be sent out July 6.

Pattern for Nosy is available to those that complete the summer sew-along. Here’s how:

Enter your links to your photos by July 5 here and get a free pattern for Betsy’s dog, Nosy, which will be sent out July 6.

Now that the sew-along is over what will be appearing?

(Don’t read if you prefer surprises) 🙂

Cuteness! Different sizes! Since I took May off from blogging (but not sewing) there’s a bit of a backlog that may appear as a post a day of mix/match patterns in AG size that you will love! After that, there are some totally adorable felt Lottie accessory projects, (definitely appearing) followed (almost certainly) by Lottie clothes and then I’m toying with several ideas for an easy (maybe foam core?) house for 8” dolls since that is a sadly neglected scale. The only issue there is what style could suit all my dolls of that size from the Lotties with their different interests, (Fairy? Hanok? Science lab? Tent? Hogwarts?) to Betsy and Ginny, who’d clearly prefer a mid-century one with their original McCall’s cardboard/fabric furniture. That will take us about up to August and back to school/work and feverishly working on a new pattern collection. If you’re like me and counting down the days until August 24, (56 more days!) you might be able to guess what the next collection will be!

A super-long post with lots of dollie updates but feel free to scroll past it all to the bottom for this week’s sew-along pattern!

As I mentioned last week, our “Betsy paper doll” SSA will run the whole month of June this year, and I’m setting up automated posts to appear for the two weeks I’ll be gone, but won’t be able to see your flickr pix or respond to comments and my etsy shop will be closed during that time too. I’ll leave all the patterns up for the duration of the sew along, and then they may transfer over to my etsy shop. If you sew all the outfits and post your pix on Flickr by the end, you can get a bonus pattern for Nosy! More info when the deadline approaches.

Where are we going? Korea! And now, let’s talk about Lottie. They’re related in a VERY roundabout way 😊 So, I’ve mentioned her a few times on the blog but haven’t had one of my own until recently, but now have a whole bunch. Let me explain… I got the book below because all my “international” doll mooks so far came from Japan.

This one, published in March, 2017 was the first Korean doll mook I’ve seen that is not just a translation of a Japanese one, but actually features Korean dolls and designers. Even though it was expensive with shipping, I wanted to get it also to encourage more of these types of books to appear.

This isn’t a book review but…the book is OK. Maybe not worth the high price I paid when shipping is factored in, mainly because there are scant instructions/patterns to actually make the cutest things they show but it does have lots of nice color photos for inspiration. Most disappointing was the part called “Furniture for my doll” that has no furniture, just a tutorial about putting two squares of ?wood? together and covering them with wallpaper to make a backdrop. ☹ Anyway, it’s full of really cute dolls about 7-8” tall that cost hundreds of dollars if you can even find them outside of Korea with some extremely basic patterns that I (although probably not everyone) could have drafted in a fairly short time. Oh darn, this is turning into a book review… If you have these dolls and speak/read Korean and have limited sewing knowledge, this is the book to get. If you’d like to know what’s trending as far as small doll clothes/settings in Korea and want a lot of inspirational photos to inspire you to create your own woodworking plans and embroidery patterns for all the cute little felt things, this is also the book for you.

OK, so how does this relate to Lottie? I figured she might be about the size of the dolls in the book, which is correct-ish. She’s the same height, but has a child body instead of the mature bodies of the book’s dolls. My toy store (Grandrabbit’s in Boulder) had a large display of them, and I grabbed “Forest Friend” mainly because of a) red hair and b) super cute packaging.

And then I did a post (no, you didn’t miss it, it just hasn’t appeared yet) on making little stuffed forest friends for her, because compared to the rest of them, Forest Friend is pretty lacking in the outfit/accessory department. Other dolls come with multi-part outfits, for example, “School Days” comes with glasses, blouse, skirt, socks, shoes, scarf, backpack, leadership cards. Forest friends comes with a dress, shoes and headband for the same price. The back of the box instructs you to collect them all, and I’m doing my best 😉. Their website also found me a new toy store I was unaware of (Jake’s Toy Box if you live near Arvada) with a super-friendly staff, some Lottie stuff in the clearance section and a deal on a Fossil Hunter Lottie! That was a great day!

We took FHL to DMNS and got some really cute pix! When I explained to some staff that this Lottie was special for promoting STEM activities for girls, specifically paleontology, and I wanted to put pix of her at the museum on my blog, they happily even let her hold a real fossil (of a trilobite below)! Taking museum photos is challenging because the lighting is often dim to preserve artifacts and using a flash is frowned upon for that reason. So, yes, not all of these are lit as well as I’d like, and there is some graininess in some of them. This was lit with a flashlight:

Check out the cute detailing on the soles of her shoes!

In addition to photos of her demonstrating her actual size (with trilobite above and ammonite below)

DH was also having fun trying to do what’s called “forced perspective” with her. If you’ve seen the special features of the Lord of the Rings movies, you might know how they play with placing things in relation to the camera to cause them to look bigger/smaller. If you place tiny Lottie super close to the camera, it’s possible to make it look like she’s more life-size. That’s a triceratops skull in the background; they are about 4m tall when “fully assembled”.

Last year, when April was the Wrenfeathers GOTY, I took her to the same museum, and you never saw a lot of those photos because they didn’t all come out well, and it’s kind of a pain hauling around a doll about the size of a human infant and trying to pose her and hoping she doesn’t fall. On the other hand it was SO much fun taking photos of Lottie because she slips easily into your purse when not needed and barely weighs anything. People seemed to find her cute and engaging as we were taking pictures too. She can also balance in small spaces, like ledges, where she watched a restoration in progress:

So, feeling like I needed a little travel doll for our vacation, I headed back to Grandrabbit’s to get a “School Days” Lottie intending to make her a hanbok and take pix of her all over Korea. Sadly, there was an issue with that doll, (dents in her face caused by her glasses being on too tight) but when I contacted the company, they were very nice about it, and fixed the problem immediately. Lottie has GREAT customer service compared to a lot of other doll companies out there right now, some of which can be a nightmare to deal with (cough, ruby red galleria).

With some searching I randomly found that lots of people, including those who paint the dolls in my Korean doll book above, are also loving and repainting Lotties! And no, not in a makeup-y kind of way, but in a soft, sweet style that is in keeping with her creators’ intent to have her look like a real child:

OK, so in other news, the best thing ever happened! An amazing person gifted me with her childhood treasures…an 18” Madame Alexander, and a Ginny and Tiny Betsy! And clothes! And patterns! I was over the moon with happiness and skipped to the sewing room with glee to make new dresses for them! They are totally in keeping with this summer’s 1950s sew-along theme and I have plans to feature them too, but this post is getting too long already so…

now the part you scrolled down for:

This week’s dress is from May 1959, and if you’re looking at this pic and saying, “I’m positive that was NEVER a Betsy paperdoll dress” you’re partially right! I love Piet Mondrian and the dresses that are even today inspired by his work. My brain was kind of focused on a half-baked plan to make some little bojagi (보자기) bedding for “Hanbok Lottie” to sleep in while I was making this dress and it hit me that this was almost the same! Bojagi is a form of mainly square/rectangular patchwork in Korea that uses unusual (to my Western eye) color combinations and often uses thin fabric with the seams as a decorative element, forming a dark outline very similar to what Piet Mondrian did in some of his paintings:

I took the color scheme from a hanbok, whose picture I unfortunately can’t find right now and came up with Betsy’s dress – inspired by Mondrian, who ?maybe? got some inspiration from bojagi and now the circle closes and Betsy’s Mondrian dress goes bojagi 😊 Of course you can make it the original way too! Our craft for this week is a mid-century table, because who doesn’t love mid-century furniture and there’s a serious lack of it out there for 14” dolls!

So the vote from last week ended up with the Betsy patterns as a winner, and I have to say

a) I’m happy we’re going in that direction and

b) I’ll have some more fun 1950s crafts besides the Betsy dresses!

This week, we’re back to our scheduled sew-along of adapted Butterick 7973. For the bodices and blouse so far, I had to make a lot of changes for a nice fit. This week’s pattern includes both the original and some notes and altered pattern pieces to adapt for Wellies and other dolls with a similar torso. As a reminder, their measurements are similar but proportions/shape are different, especially at the waist. So more fitted pants were difficult to have fit both equally well.

OK, and that’s all the time I have to post so I can go get the guest room ready for the weekend. Our guest bed is usually covered with dolls awaiting fittings/photo shoots, and piles and piles and piles of outfits, but when your niece gets a last minute flight, you have to run in there and shove all the poor dolls back into their boxes and do something with all those outfits… Note to self: visit her next time instead 🙂

OK, green was not necessarily a 1950s color, but after making all the other things in pink and blue, I needed a change. When I went to take the pix, I noticed it was “green and white” outside too, thanks to a snowstorm falling on the just-beginning-to-emerge grass.

The outfit for this week is a blouse/pants combo that looks perfect and vintage on Toni. Girls in the 1950s might have worn this as play clothes or maybe for gardening or some other task, but it wouldn’t have been appropriate for, say, school. On a modern doll like my Della, it seems to hint “vintage” in a really sweet way. This would be an adorable outfit for a young child too!

For this week, we have another easy-to-sew mid-century dress that’s equally adorable on vintage or modern dolls. You’ll notice this skirt is MUCH wider than last week’s. Skirts in the 1950s were very wide, but it can be hard to gather enough fabric onto a smaller bodice to get that look. Poly-cotton blend gingham is usually on the thin side, which meant more of it could be used than if I’d chosen a heavier-weight fabric. A puffy petticoat can hold it out to Toni’s width, or you can let it hang naturally like Emiko’s for a less fussy look.

In case you’re wondering, yes, I was going for a vaguely “Dorothy” look on Toni with the shiny shoes 🙂

Share your creations:

If you post pix, it tells me you are enjoying the 1950s series and more things will keep appearing! I spent last weekend on some 50s craft projects that your dolls might like and am also working on some larger size outfits too!

They don’t even need to be 1950s-inspired. Check out the princess dress with clever crown from gammerangel:

Wellies at Target?

Yep. Well, some of the SuperTargets anyway, as my husband noticed, which led to a “Awesome Husband” award last weekend. I’ve had a rough couple of weeks and was super stressed out about work and DH wanted to go hiking and get my mind off things. When he opened my car door, look who was waiting for a hug:

🙂

It’s the Wellie Wisher Kendall, whom I’m calling “Della” for short. Apparently she’s the crafty/DIY gal of the group which he thought was a good fit for my personality. It seems almost unreasonable that I’d like her so much – she’s just a piece of plastic, right? But I can’t stop smiling every time I see her! Receiving her this way made her a symbol that my husband acknowledged I was super stressed, and went out of his way to do something that would make me smile. ❤

You might remember a few weeks ago, I posted a link to an article about bias in film toward an “idealized” beauty of the 1950s. Kodak skewed their color film to bias a blue-eyed blonde with red lips and an overall cool tone to her coloring. But it wasn’t just the coloring that epitomized the era; I’ve written before about how doll bodies conform to the fashion sensibilities of their times, like Patsy with her roly-poly body that looked great in sweet little 1930s bishop-style dresses. Likewise, 1960s Barbie’s outrageously strange proportions have morphed into Lammily in our times.

This week I’m comparing a hugely popular 1950s doll, Toni, with a similar-sized modern one, Wellie Wisher Emiko.

You can see first of all here, their body shapes are very different, even though their bust/waist measurements are almost the same. Emiko’s torso is flattened out, whereas Toni’s is cylindrical. The same dress can be made to fit both, but ends up looking very different! See both in the same dress here and here or in the pattern below.

It’s also interesting to note that Toni looks quite “made up” with a fussier hairstyle, heavy lipstick and blush, and even some eye shadow, whereas Emiko’s coloring is more natural, yet both dolls are beautiful reflections of their own time.

I’ve been on a vintage sewing spree lately for 18″ dolls (more to come on that soon), and decided to also sew for Toni, using vintage Butterick 7973, supposedly sized for her. (image below from Pinterest)

Well, I bought the original 14″ version, but it didn’t really fit too well, and since I was altering it anyway, I thought it would be fun to see if I could make the same pattern look nice on both body shapes. It took more adjusting than I had anticipated, but so far it’s going well! Toni’s body lends itself to darts, which were a major feature of 1950s bodices at the waistlines, even for little children who didn’t really need them. Those same darts made the dress quite ill-fitting on the Wellie body.

The pattern was re-released a few years ago, as Butterick #5865 without any indication of who it would fit, and I posted some pix on flickr of one dress I made on a variety of dolls, noting that it seemed to fit the Journey Girls the best. It’s also a reminder that my photography skills have improved a lot since 2013, because the pictures are not that great! 🙂

Anyway, I’m hoping to do a little sew-along of 1950s styles to fit 14″ dolls and hope you’ll join in! They are quite easy to sew, and a great place to show off your small bits of vintage fabric and trims!

Speaking of the flickr page, I LOVE seeing what you’ve made with my patterns, and even though I’m on yet another historical bent, it’s nice to showcase sewing for our modern dolls that reflects modern interests and different cultures. Check out what Lisa did with clever use of prints that mimics embroidery on the kamiz:

And Carol shows us that Little Darling’s Karate Gi will fit the Wellies too:

They match well with the items from the previous two weeks as well as just about anything else! Made in thin fabric they are a good substitute for tights to tuck into the “Wellies’ Wellies” 🙂 without excess fabric on the foot to make them fit too tightly.